Litmaps

What is Litmaps?

Litmaps (Litmaps.com) is a scientific literature research and visual mapping software founded in 2020 in New Zealand. The platform uses artificial intelligence and graph network visualizations to help scientists, PhD candidates, and researchers discover relevant scientific articles, visualize how different theories evolved over time, and track complex citation networks chronologically and interactively.

How it works

The user starts by importing their existing reference library (via BibTeX files or connecting managers like Zotero) or searching for a "seed paper". Litmaps builds a literature map (Litmap), where articles are represented by visual nodes distributed on a two-dimensional Cartesian plane, where the horizontal axis represents the timeline (publication years) and the vertical axis or connections represent citation volumes and relationships.

The platform's artificial intelligence uses predictive search algorithms to cross-reference these co-citation connections, automatically identifying crucial articles or recent publications the researcher left out of their bibliography.

Key features

• Visual Chronological Mapping: Visualize your research articles in a clear timeline demonstrating the evolution of scientific concepts.
• AI Automated Search (Discover Runs): The AI sweeps the global academic database to suggest seminally connected articles and papers for your current study theme.
• New Publication Monitoring (Alerts): Receive automatic email notifications when new scientific articles citing your current collection are published worldwide.
• Reference Manager Integration: Automated two-way synchronization with tools like Zotero and Mendeley.
• Cluster Visualization: Automatic visual grouping of articles according to specific related themes.

Available integrations

Litmaps connects directly with major academic reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote), and extracts data and metadata from large open scientific indexes, such as OpenAlex and Crossref.

Who it is for

• Postgraduate students (Master's and PhD) who need to exhaustively review scientific literature to structure their theses.
• Senior researchers who want to stay up to date with new publications in their fields of specialty.
• Scientific research teams in laboratories looking to collaborate on literature reviews visually and centrally.

Real-world use cases

1. Avoiding Omission of Seminal References: A chemistry researcher creates a visual map of his new research in Litmaps. Upon running the AI search tool, the platform flags a highly cited classic 2012 paper he had not included in his initial bibliography.
2. Scientific Historiography: A university professor uses Litmaps' chronological maps in class to demonstrate visually how a molecular biology discovery in the 90s triggered dozens of new modern research branches.

Pricing

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The chronological timeline map greatly facilitates understanding the history of a theory.
• Automatic synchronization with Zotero saves time importing and exporting data.
• The new article alerts system prevents daily repetitive manual searches on Google Scholar.

Cons:

• The interactive graphic display can get overly cluttered and confusing if the map contains more than 500 connected articles at once.
• Using advanced automated AI features requires purchasing the paid Pro plan.